What Does The ‘Post’ in ‘Post-Conflict’ Do?:Telling Stories About Gender-Based Violence After War

Gender-based violence, including but not limited to sexual violence, is one of the most significant and widespread threats to security that people experience on both individual and collective levels. As feminist scholars remind us, it is important to pay attention to such violence not only in narrowly defined conflict spaces but across the continuum: in public and private spheres, and across pre-war, war, and post-war timelines. In this context of fluidity - of continuity as well as change - categorising, temporalizing, and narrating violence is a fraught and political endeavour. In seeking to make sense of gender-based violence in/and the post-conflict, then, in this chapter I ask questions about the political work that the idea of ‘post-ness’ might generate. I do this through an exploration of two distinct elements of my work to date: an interview-based study exploring refugees’ understanding of the relationship between ‘outsider’ sexual violence in conflict spaces and intimate partner violence; and the commemoration of the so-called comfort women of the Asia-Pacific War in the contemporary USA. Through these disparate examples, I unpack the varied political work that can be done by different ways of storying the relationship between past violence and the present moment.